From my own personal experience, having several different complementary disciplines at postgraduate level, I know that education suffers from the ‘Silo Effect’. Put simply, this describes an attitude found in some organizations that occurs when several departments or groups do not want to share information or knowledge with other individuals in the same company. A silo mentality reduces efficiency and leads to poor cooperation and communications, and can be a contributing factor to a failing corporate culture. Contemporary management views suggest that the silo mentality mindset must be broken in order for employees to remain motivated and be happy to come to work. Mind the gap!

Personally, I wish to become a corporate law trainee solicitor one day, and I am currently working hard at my full-time MBA at the BPP Business School. Previous to that, I did my GDL and LLB(Hons) there at BPP (at BPP Law School), and I completed my LLM in international commercial legal practice at the College of Law of England and Wales last year. The MBA is probably the most intense intellectual experience I’ve had recently, of all of these, but emphasizes the importance of the key competencies of teamwork, communication and (of course!) commercial awareness.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that business students wish to learn about the law, and law students wish to learn about business. We are fortunate at BPP to have superb schools in business and law, making such cross-fertilisation entirely possible (specifically, ‘working synergies’ avoiding the aforementioned ‘Silo Effect’).

I’ve founded a student society, run entirely by students for students, called the ‘Legal Awareness Society’. We currently hold fortnightly meetings in term-time with successful interactive discussions on ‘the importance of the law to business, and the importance of business to the law’ (our mission statement). Here’s a list of our meetings between now and December 2011.

We simply abbreviate the name of our Society to ‘LegalAware’, and a strength of this is our outreach to legal and business professionals (including journalists, firms and educators) and students through the social media. ‘LegalAware’ has a very popular Twitter stream, and really up-to-date blog. The blog has pages on the following topics:

• general legal news? and meetings
• arbitration
• climate change and the law
• competition
• corporate social responsibility
• debt finance
• e-commerce
• employment and pensions
• insurance
• intellectual property
• IPOs and rights issues
• Islamic finance
• joint ventures
• share acquisitions
• technology and the media

The beauty about this blog is that we can distribute material concerning our meetings even if our own students can’t physically make it (see, for example, our recent article and presentation on cloud computing and launching a legal e-mail marketing campaign). We have a team of students predominantly from BPP and beyond who contribute regularly to this material. The Society takes full responsibility for this material, our views are our personal and our own, and nothing to do with the staff or products/services of BPP proper. I’d love to hear from you if you’re doing something similar at a MBA school, or thinking about doing something similar in the near future. It would be great to swop notes for me!

Thus far, we have been particularly keen to involve law students who wish to demonstrate commercial awareness and/or teamwork skills in corporate law training contract applications this year. However, all attendees at our physical meetings so far have been MBA students (because presumably law students are on holiday), who ask really insightful questions about how the English law operates in reality! The beauty about the Society is that all discussions are conducted in a non-threatening way. I’d say the exams don’t come into it, but our recent discussion of corporate social responsibility would have been very useful for candidates of diet 1 of the recent diet of the BPP MBA ‘Markets and Marketing’ compulsory module. The Society never gives specific advice, but only have a rewarding discussion about the principles.

Finally, I think we will have achieved something if people genuinely derive benefit from understanding how the law and commerce interact, at both SME and corporate level. I also reckon it’s a great way for students and professionals to interact, avoid the ‘Silo Effect’, and even think about alternative career horizons, strange though that may seem.

@legalaware – please follow on Twitter!